100 days: Day 24

30/12/2009

Headgear.

The hat is fashioned out of toilet roll tubes, about 30 or 40, maybe more, but you couldn’t tell to look at it. It has a kind of plastic shiny finish which confuses me and the whole structure of the thing conveys a sense of function, like it’s a complex piece of equipment. He has a different story for its purpose every time he’s asked about it, which was often and he confided to me once when he was drunk that that’s the reason he wears it, to become an intriguing ‘character’. His passing resemblance to Lovejoy used to garner him some attention, but that hot ticket has run its course, there was a brief revival when Deadwood came out but that’s a fairly niche programme over here.

Here’s a short list of the hats various uses on different days in the same pub:

It’s a telekinetic earthing device to avoid cerebral cortex fusing while working part time as a experimental bridge construction agent.

It’s a Sky plus reminder module (he was tired that day).

He’s developing the perming device to end all perming devices (the hat is said device, but you’ve gathered that). It has the potential to mould and recondition hair into any conceivable shape or pattern. It takes a couple of months to fully ‘bake’ a look and when he finally takes the device off those with heart conditions should brace themselves as the hair will be magnificent, barely recognisable as hair, it’ll have an otherworldly quality, it’ll be the mere suggestion of hair wrapped up in an aesthetic tour-de-force that has the potential to detach retinas as onlookers brains reject their own eyes as they fail to align vision with cogent thought. In fact he’s keeping the end product under wraps for this very reason, nothing is to be gained by blowing people’s minds so thoroughly it’ll cause lasting perhaps irreversible damage. He’ll view his perm once, behind closed doors and may not survive the spectacle with sound mind, but he’s willing to take one for the progression of beauty and salon technique.

It’s a flavour enhancer.

It’s the most recent incarnation of the Chinese Head Trap. He lost a bet in Shanghai and he’s got three other traps attached to other parts of his body.